Nothing in the analysis will be new to long time search marketers, but since so many people new to search engine optimization ask for nice, concise lists of what’s important to rank well in the search engines, I thought I’d indulge.
* Keywords in the title tag
* Targeted keywords in the body tag
* Keywords in H2-H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on the rankings while keywords in H1 headline tags don’t seem to have an effect.
* Using keywords in bold or strong tags - slight effect
* Keywords in image file names
* Keywords in image alt attributes
* Keyword in the domain name - although, using domain names as link text may explain this
* Web pages that use very few parameters in the URL (?id=123, etc.)
* PageRank
* Inbound links - The top result on Google has usually about four times as many links as result number 11.
Additional notes:
* Keywords in the file name don’t seem to have a positive effect
* The file size doesn’t seem to influence the ranking of a web page on Google although smaller sites tend to have slightly higher rankings.